Facets: The Spokeo Enigma

Personal information from social networks, blogs and photo albums, dating sites, music and video sites, eCommerce stores, and real-time web services like Google Earth are all compiled to single out each individual in the US, and most of the connected modern world. The compiling of information has now come of age and is being utilized by the new owners of planet Earth. Is it for the common good? Well, that is laughable.

Spokeo collects data from both online and offline sources, and uses a special software package to compile it. Though it is not clear yet where all of the information is coming from, Wikipedia indicates the two main resources to be MySpace and Facebook.

“Various aggregation services provide tools or widgets to allow users to consolidate messages, track friends, combine bookmarks, search across multiple social networking sites, read RSS feeds for multiple social networks, see when their name is mentioned on various sites, access their profiles from a single interface, provide “life streams”, etc.” -Wikipedia.

Information for similar social networks like Twitter, Youtube, Stumbleupon, Digg, Delicious, and other major platform communities communicate in real time by an API (Application Programming Interface) application. It is a crossing point between different software programs and facilitates real time information stream with speedy communication. When permission is given by a user id and password, each social media is then considered “syndicated” and a user’s information becomes public and accessible. Examples of such clients are Doozly, Sobees and Sociagg.

One might put two and two together by the revelation that Facebook, now with over 600 million active users are owned by Google since 2008. It was purchased at a stock and cash value of 25 billion. “We feel this accurately reflects Microsoft’s market share in the Web 2.0 economy,” Schmidt said, Google CEO.

Schmidt indicated that it was because of good people jumping ship from Google to Facebook as the primary reason for the acquisition, now owning 98.4 percent of Facebook.

“With the acquisition of Facebook, users will be able to take advantage of Open Social applications across all the major social networks on the planet,” he said. “We’ll be able to incorporate Facebook apps directly into Android, our new mobile operating system. And, frankly, we were losing too many of our top people to Facebook. So now they’re all back where they belong. Forever.”

One might question why Goldman Sachs is so interested in Facebook. Is it because of the people they are acquiring, or the unprecedented amount of personal information? Information seems to be the primary tool of a New World Order, where knowledge is the fuel for a dominate machine to lucratively forge ahead.

Author’s note: The 600 million on Facebook are connected to the rest of the planet by a grid of epic proportions, now easily acessable by the new owners of planet Earth. Control also comes with responsibility, so easily relinquished when your banking and business consortium makes money of both war and peace, deconstruction and reconstruction, with puppets willing to die to make it happen. Rather Freudian, don’t you think?

Want to undo Spokeo? Go here. It is a well researched vid with a lot of insight! You can fight back.

It’s a simple but beautiful metaphor. Our soul is likened to an uncut diamond, pure, perfect, and unrealized. Each learned experience cleaves a facet on its face, and leaves it changed forever. Through this facet, this clear window, new light, new questions and ideas take shape and form. This process is our reason for being…